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The ghost of Nicolas Sarkozy will have definitely hovered over the campaign of Valérie Pécresse until the end. After stubbornly refusing to support him, he almost ruined his last meeting in Paris. Seven days before the first round, the former right-wing president was briefly booed before candidate LR entered the scene.
Ironically, it was in this same Exhibition Center that Nicolas Sarkozy launched his victorious campaign in 2007. I didn’t want this reaction, quite the contrary. “, immediately reacted Yann Werhling, who provoked these boos in spite of himself when he wanted to mention the Grenelle de l’Environnement carried by the former head of state. But the sequence, already, circulates abundantly on social networks … And, from Marseille, Renaud Muselier, the boss of the South region, who left LR barely six months ago, immediately reacted: “ by booing our former President of the Republic, the last supporters of Valérie Pécresse show all the drift of this party ».
“No one dares tell him what’s wrong”: the Pécresse camp begins the inventory of a calvary campaign
For this last major Parisian meeting of Valérie Pécresse, the tenors of the right took their place in the front rows. A few days earlier, Geoffroy Didier, the candidate’s communications director had spoiled on #RadioPécresse: ” It will be a team meeting, with a space for the tenors of the party and another for the new faces to which Valérie Pécresse has set foot in the stirrup. »
Indeed, from Gérard Larcher to Laurent Wauquiez, via the vice-presidents of Valérie Pécresse in the Île-de-France region, Alexandra Dublanche or Othman Nasrou, all are present. But the displayed unity is fraying with the first images from the front row leaking on the continuous news channels or on the six giant screens arranged in the room.
On BFMTV, we thus see a hilarious Laurent Wauquiez removing the label indicating the place of Damien Abad, the boss of the LR deputies in the Assembly. On the giant screens, we see that the candidate joins the tenors of the right gathered in the first row, without effusion. The “musketeers”, – the losers of the LR Congress -, greet him with short salutes and polite smiles. Hard to believe that we are seven days away from the first round.
From the Zenith, Valérie Pécresse will have kept her desk. No teleprompter this time, but a speech of regarding 45 minutes, which she reads in front of 5,000 activists. “I am not the candidate of the verb”she says, moreover, as if to definitively close the debates on her previous meetings. “It’s a tragedy that politics, by dint of getting drunk on its own words, ended up convincing itself that to say was to act”, she continues. Before throwing yet another spade at the outgoing president: “ If you can’t stand fine talkers who are ultimately just bad actors. If you prefer a woman who dares to those who gloss. So join me! »
In a more successful speech than the previous ones, the candidate spins the metaphor of these showmen candidates. She integrates Eric Zemmour or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom she is now following in the polls. She is indignant. Sagacious. Raise your voice once morest this campaign “parody”. “We can build from scratch, as Éric Zemmour did, a fake encounter at a service station”she exclaims. “We can also refuse the debate with the other candidates, like Mrs. Le Pen or the President who, from his balcony at the Elysée Palace, looks down on democracy”she outbids before asking the room: “But who is indignant? I hear no voice to denounce this parody. This is the democratic collapse to which the society of the spectacle has led us. »
Curious moment that this last meeting in Paris. Curious, because for once, Valérie Pécresse seems totally uninhibited. “ That’s really how we know her.”, texts us a young elected representative from the Ile-de-France region. This time, it is Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo or Romain Gary who feed his speech and no longer the far-right references drawn from Renaud Camus or Charles Maurras for his first major Parisian meeting at the Zenith. Gary, first, to talk regarding concord. ” I don’t have a drop of French blood but France runs through my veins “, she says, choosing to take the same sentence out of context as Manuel Valls in his book published in April 2021.
A paraphrase of Balzac then to say ” that no generation has the right to belittle another “. A way of criticizing once more, an Emmanuel Macron who would have ” guaranteed the future of future generations ” signing “checks with a vengeance”. Hugo finally to say ” to love is to act ».
Basically, the discourse is more literary and more fluid than those of recent months. It will end with an anaphora which sounds the last reminder before the first round.
“So, I call on all French people to whom Emmanuel Macron has inflicted his contempt, to join me:
I call on the courageous on the front lines qualified as the last of the rope.
I call on the invisible who give everything, and yet have been described as “nothing” people.
I call young people, accused of not crossing the street to find a job.
I call the voters who, as in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, see their vote trampled.
I call on all these humiliated and injured French people, these “pissed off” French people to join us on the path of respect and pride (…).”
Unfortunately for her, the speech is over and the debates on the sets of the continuous news channels are still in a loop… on Nicolas Sarkozy booed.
